buy_me_this.
i_love_blink_almost_enough_to_be_this_tacky. =[ =[
Thursday, July 30, 2009
about to pour forth.
unfortunately, the full text of oscar wilde's De Profundis, the current love of my literary life, is not available online. a good chunk of it can be found here (it actually comes in at page 46 of the printed version, which is appalling, as wilde would have deemed it). though i underlined half the letter to save quotes from it, it would be pointless to type them here, so i'll share the most thrilling ones:
"One half-hour with Art was always more to me than a cycle with you. Nothing really at any period of my life was ever of the smallest importance to me compared with Art. But in the case of an artist, weakness is nothing less than a crime, when it is a weakness that paralyses the imagination."
"Ultimately the bond of all companionship, whether in marriage or in friendship, is conversation, and conversation must have a common basis, and between two people of widely different culture the only common basis possible is the lowest level. The trivial in thought and action is charming."
"I reply by a letter of fantastic literary conceits... The letter is like a passage from one of Shakespeare's sonnets, transposed to a minor key."
"You did not realise that there is no room for both passions in the same soul. They cannot live together in that fair carven house. Love is fed by the imagination, by which we become wiser than we know, better than we feel, nobler than we are: by which we can see Life as a whole: by which, and by which alone, we can understand others in their real as in their ideal relations. Only what is fine, and finely conceived, can feed Love. But anything will feed Hate."
"The fatal errors of life are not due to man's being unreasonable: an unreasonable moment may be one's finest moment. They are due to man's being logical. There is a wide difference."
"Don't you realise now that you should have seen it, and come forward and said that you would not have my Art, at any rate, ruined for your sake? You knew what my Art was to me, the great primal note by which I had revealed, first myself to myself, and then myself to the world; the real passion of my life; the love to which all other loves were as marsh-water to red wine, or the glow-worm of the marsh to the magic mirror of the moon. Don't you understand now that your lack of imagination was the one really fatal defect of your character?"
"[Love's] joy, like the joy of the intellect, is to feel itself alive. The aim of Love is to love: no more, and no less."
"The great things of life are what they seem to be, and for that reason, ...are often difficult to interpret. But the little things of life are symbols. We receive our bitter lessons most easily through them."
"Sorrow is the most sensitive of all created things. There is nothing that stirs in the whole world of thought or motion to which Sorrow does not vibrate in terrible if exquisite pulsation. The thin beaten-out leaf of tremulous gold that chronicles the direction of forces that the eye cannot see is in comparison coarse. It is a wound that bleeds when any hand but that of Love touches it and even then must bleed again, though not for pain."
"Literature is, and has been, and always will remain the supreme representative art."
"There is a tact in love, and a tact in literature; you were not sensitive to either."
"Nobody, great or small, can be ruined except by his own hand."
"I made art a philosophy, and philosophy an art: I altered the minds of men and the colours of things: there was nothing I said or did that did not make people wonder: I took the drama, the most objective form known to art, and made it as personal a mode of expression as the lyric or the sonnet, at the same time that I widened its range and enriched its characterisation: drama, novel, poem in rhyme, poem in prose, subtle or fantastic dialogue, whatever I touched I made beautiful in a new mode of beauty: to truth itself I gave what is false no less than what is true as its rightful province, and showed that the false and the true are merely forms of intellectual existence. I treated Art as the supreme reality, and life as a mere mode of fiction: I awoke the imagination of my century so that it created myth and legend around me: I summed up all systems in a phrase, and all existence in an epigram."
"If I may not write beautiful books, I may at least read beautiful books, and what joy can be greater?"
"The faith that others give to what is unseen, I give to what one can touch, and look at. My gods dwell in temples made with hands; and within the circle of actual experience is my creed made perfect and complete: too complete, it may be, for like many or all of those who have placed their heaven in this earth, I have found in it not merely the beauty of heaven, but the horror of hell also. When I think about religion at all, I feel as if I would like to found an order for those who CANNOT believe: the Confraternity of the Faithless, one might call it, where on an altar, on which no taper burned, a priest, in whose heart peace had no dwelling, might celebrate with unblessed bread and a chalice empty of wine. Every thing to be true must become a religion."
"If I can produce even one more beautiful work of art I shall be able to rob malice of its venom, and cowardice of its sneer, and to pluck out the tongue of scorn by the roots... The only people I would care to be with now are artists and people who have suffered: those who know what Beauty is, and those who know what Sorrow is: nobody else interests me."
AND OH MY GOD SO MUCH MORE... that was already way too much.. oops.
"One half-hour with Art was always more to me than a cycle with you. Nothing really at any period of my life was ever of the smallest importance to me compared with Art. But in the case of an artist, weakness is nothing less than a crime, when it is a weakness that paralyses the imagination."
"Ultimately the bond of all companionship, whether in marriage or in friendship, is conversation, and conversation must have a common basis, and between two people of widely different culture the only common basis possible is the lowest level. The trivial in thought and action is charming."
"I reply by a letter of fantastic literary conceits... The letter is like a passage from one of Shakespeare's sonnets, transposed to a minor key."
"You did not realise that there is no room for both passions in the same soul. They cannot live together in that fair carven house. Love is fed by the imagination, by which we become wiser than we know, better than we feel, nobler than we are: by which we can see Life as a whole: by which, and by which alone, we can understand others in their real as in their ideal relations. Only what is fine, and finely conceived, can feed Love. But anything will feed Hate."
"The fatal errors of life are not due to man's being unreasonable: an unreasonable moment may be one's finest moment. They are due to man's being logical. There is a wide difference."
"Don't you realise now that you should have seen it, and come forward and said that you would not have my Art, at any rate, ruined for your sake? You knew what my Art was to me, the great primal note by which I had revealed, first myself to myself, and then myself to the world; the real passion of my life; the love to which all other loves were as marsh-water to red wine, or the glow-worm of the marsh to the magic mirror of the moon. Don't you understand now that your lack of imagination was the one really fatal defect of your character?"
"[Love's] joy, like the joy of the intellect, is to feel itself alive. The aim of Love is to love: no more, and no less."
"The great things of life are what they seem to be, and for that reason, ...are often difficult to interpret. But the little things of life are symbols. We receive our bitter lessons most easily through them."
"Sorrow is the most sensitive of all created things. There is nothing that stirs in the whole world of thought or motion to which Sorrow does not vibrate in terrible if exquisite pulsation. The thin beaten-out leaf of tremulous gold that chronicles the direction of forces that the eye cannot see is in comparison coarse. It is a wound that bleeds when any hand but that of Love touches it and even then must bleed again, though not for pain."
"Literature is, and has been, and always will remain the supreme representative art."
"There is a tact in love, and a tact in literature; you were not sensitive to either."
"Nobody, great or small, can be ruined except by his own hand."
"I made art a philosophy, and philosophy an art: I altered the minds of men and the colours of things: there was nothing I said or did that did not make people wonder: I took the drama, the most objective form known to art, and made it as personal a mode of expression as the lyric or the sonnet, at the same time that I widened its range and enriched its characterisation: drama, novel, poem in rhyme, poem in prose, subtle or fantastic dialogue, whatever I touched I made beautiful in a new mode of beauty: to truth itself I gave what is false no less than what is true as its rightful province, and showed that the false and the true are merely forms of intellectual existence. I treated Art as the supreme reality, and life as a mere mode of fiction: I awoke the imagination of my century so that it created myth and legend around me: I summed up all systems in a phrase, and all existence in an epigram."
"If I may not write beautiful books, I may at least read beautiful books, and what joy can be greater?"
"The faith that others give to what is unseen, I give to what one can touch, and look at. My gods dwell in temples made with hands; and within the circle of actual experience is my creed made perfect and complete: too complete, it may be, for like many or all of those who have placed their heaven in this earth, I have found in it not merely the beauty of heaven, but the horror of hell also. When I think about religion at all, I feel as if I would like to found an order for those who CANNOT believe: the Confraternity of the Faithless, one might call it, where on an altar, on which no taper burned, a priest, in whose heart peace had no dwelling, might celebrate with unblessed bread and a chalice empty of wine. Every thing to be true must become a religion."
"If I can produce even one more beautiful work of art I shall be able to rob malice of its venom, and cowardice of its sneer, and to pluck out the tongue of scorn by the roots... The only people I would care to be with now are artists and people who have suffered: those who know what Beauty is, and those who know what Sorrow is: nobody else interests me."
AND OH MY GOD SO MUCH MORE... that was already way too much.. oops.
Wednesday, July 29, 2009
Tuesday, July 28, 2009
Sunday, July 26, 2009
Saturday, July 25, 2009
from a ship.
I'm thinking about things the way I would like to see them. A cage of empty subconscious rattles and rolls before me, luring me to enter. So I lean back into this cushy seat that steals my head and forces its warm breath along my spine and into my thoughts. And suddenly there isn't anything I'd rather do more. I'm leaning against a stone window through which no one can see me. Eyeing the shapes and figures around me, I construct them into words and passages. Am I pathetic because the waves dash around me and I want to be alone with them, to breathe them in as religion, praying to my own senses? This is a world as I see it.
Friday, July 17, 2009
another way.
I'm in a stationary vehicle, my love and I. My soul and head are here. Suddenly I feel the urge to live as something so overwhelmingly forceful. I consider all the books I've yet to read, all the important people I've yet to meet. I have hoped and feared of finding myself in this position, of lingering in one spot too long with my own thoughts, my own soul, of falling in love so deeply with my heart that I feel so one-sided. And yet, I don't want to open the door, don't want to whisper the fatal word I know I must utter. He stares at me and we are both paralyzed in a heavy, sultry nothingness of time. My throat has been caught in my breath and I feel as if I should never speak again. Unlatching the door, I step back onto the earth, all at once realizing that I must say something another way. Inspiration expands in my lungs but does not permeate my oxygen when I attempt to say goodbye. I know I must tell you, tell you, some other way, but not here, not on this day caught between two schisms.
Tuesday, July 7, 2009
i can't believe i just read it.
"Broaden your minds, my dears, and allow your eyes to see past the mundane!"
-HP3
"The mind is not a book, to be opened at will and examined at leisure. Thoughts are not etched on the inside of skulls, to be perused by any invader. The mind is a complex and many-layered thing."
-HP5
"Never trust anything that can think for itself, if you can't see where it keeps its brain."
-HPsomething
-HP3
"The mind is not a book, to be opened at will and examined at leisure. Thoughts are not etched on the inside of skulls, to be perused by any invader. The mind is a complex and many-layered thing."
-HP5
"Never trust anything that can think for itself, if you can't see where it keeps its brain."
-HPsomething
transformation of bernard.
"Now begins to rise in me the familiar rhythm; words that have lain dormant now lift, now toss their crests, and fall and rise, and fall and rise again. I am a poet, yes. Surely I am a great poet. Boats and youth passing and distant trees, 'the falling fountains of the pendent trees.' I see it all. I feel it all. I am inspired. My eyes fill with tears. Yet even as I feel this, I lash my frenzy higher and higher. It foams. It becomes artificial, insincere. Words and words and words, how they gallop -- how they lash their long manes and tails, but for some fault in me I cannot give myself to their backs; I cannot fly with them, scattering women and string bags. There is some flaw in me -- some fatal hesitancy, which, if I pass it over, turns to foam and falsity. Yet it is incredible that I should not be a great poet. What did I write last night if it was not poetry? Am I too fast, too facile? I do not know. I do not know myself sometimes, or how to measure and name and count out the grains that make me what I am."
p. 83
"My book, stuffed with phrases, has dropped to the floor. It lies under the table to be swept up by the charwoman when she comes wearily at dawn looking for scraps of paper, old tram tickets, and here and there a note screwed into a ball and left with the litter to be swept up. What is the phrase for the moon? And the phrase for love? By what name are we to call death? I do not know. I need a little language such as lovers use, words of one syllable such as children speak when they come into the room and find their mother sewing and pick up some scrap of bright wool, a feather, or a shred of chintz. I need a howl; a cry. When the storm crosses the marsh and sweeps over me where I lie in the ditch unregarded I need no words. Nothing neat. Nothing that comes down with all its feet on the floor. None of those resonances and lovely echoes that break and chime from nerve to nerve in our breasts making wild music, false phrases. I have done with phrases."
p. 295
-Virginia Woolf, The Waves
p. 83
"My book, stuffed with phrases, has dropped to the floor. It lies under the table to be swept up by the charwoman when she comes wearily at dawn looking for scraps of paper, old tram tickets, and here and there a note screwed into a ball and left with the litter to be swept up. What is the phrase for the moon? And the phrase for love? By what name are we to call death? I do not know. I need a little language such as lovers use, words of one syllable such as children speak when they come into the room and find their mother sewing and pick up some scrap of bright wool, a feather, or a shred of chintz. I need a howl; a cry. When the storm crosses the marsh and sweeps over me where I lie in the ditch unregarded I need no words. Nothing neat. Nothing that comes down with all its feet on the floor. None of those resonances and lovely echoes that break and chime from nerve to nerve in our breasts making wild music, false phrases. I have done with phrases."
p. 295
-Virginia Woolf, The Waves
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